Excellent article and interview.

Jack London helped me see how those in control (here the New Orleans owners of enslaved people, the merchants, and/or the politicians—author says many were all 3) would likely respond to an event (including disease) so as to preserve their own position and then claim that as moral and scientific:

In The Iron Heel, referring to owners of northern factories with child labor and other ghastly working conditions, Jack London wrote,

“When they want to do a thing, in business of course, they must wait till there arises in their brains, somehow, a religious, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, concept that the thing is right. And then they go ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the thought.“

I try to stay personally vigilant in remembering how my mind can trick me this way. The trick works in so very many contexts.

Fascinating article:

> But they counter the pushback by essentially denying disease, both as an epidemiological reality and as a social reality too. Increasingly by the 1850s, you see people saying, well, yellow fever is not that big of a problem. It’s not that serious of an illness, and anybody who’s temperate and well-mannered and courageous and manly will survive. It only kills the immoral, the drunk, the unfortunate. Your cousin in Philadelphia or your niece in Sligo who thinks of New Orleans as a “necropolis,” they don’t know what they’re talking about, these northern critiques of New Orleans’s health situation are a proxy for abolitionists attacking slavery

> It’s actually a miraculous demonstration of just how effective martial law can be in stopping diseases, I guess, and how effective quarantine could be when properly instituted and rigorously upheld.

In case of endemic disease the question is "Do I want to live under martial law till the rest of my life?"

Regarding Trump and his immunocapitalist behavior: I understand the position of the "Great Barrington Declaration" would be to make a majority of the population "acclimated" as soon as possible. Only lock down the vulnerable population. This could be effective because covid is not as deadly as yellow fever and not dangerous to a significant portion of the population. Setting aside all the Fauci political piss matching, I do wonder what might have happened with that approach.

>And I always think of that picture as an image of the 21st century’s first immunocapitalist.

I make the opposite argument - while huge numbers of ordinary citizens were kept under effective house arrest (or other restrictions), the wealthy and powerful became ever more wealthy and powerful while no-one was looking. We were turned into obedient, house-bound consumers of social media, low-grade TV, and mail-order rubbish.

That’s pretty dark. Immunocapitalism is a new word for me but we have a much longer history of using disease in North America… at least all the way back to the first Europeans coming across the ocean. Even with all of our technology and knowledge, our species is still easily recognized as the same thing that existed 1000s of years ago. True change is hard.